A couple of expansion packs were released for the original Sims title, and they sold pretty well, which resulted in numerous packs coming out, including the most pathetic, ‘The Sims: Makin’ Magic‘, where the characers could pretend to be the little twits in the Harry Potter series, except they lacked any spells that could kill other sims, which would be the best spell of all.

It was inevitable, as the Sims was the best selling PC-game of all time, a sequal was coming at some point. The game was very amusing for me, and I enjoyed killing my sims just as much as in the previous game. Although, after a couple of months of playing, I realized something. EA, (the publisher of the game), had lied to me. These sims weren’t like you or I, they were the same old, poorly computer generated personalities that we saw in the original game, with a slight facelift. Its kind of like the Liberal Party of Canada. No matter how many times you change the leader of it, its still the same, party with the same old bullshit.

I stopped playing the game soon after for that reason, and because I had come to realize that if I couldn’t manage my own life properly, I shouldn’t be focusing on the virtual lives of data on an LCD monitor.

After milking the living shit out of ‘The Sims 2‘ by bring out expansion pack after expansion pack, somebody at EA said, “Hey, these expansions don’t seem to be selling as well as they used to. I think its time for CODE SEQUAL”. And with that we have the announcement of the upcoming title for the PC, ‘The Sims 3‘.

When I heard the annoucement for this title, I became very excited, as I wanted the personalities in the game to become more realistic than they were before, and I wanted more realistic graphics. EA is saying that the characters in the game will be much more realistic than before, and have deeper personalities. Upon reading this, I quietly sung the Final Fantasy victory song to myself. I was excited to see the screenshots of actual gameplay, and after wating a minute for the damn pictures to load, (seriously EA, get some more bandwidth), I was incredibly dissapointed.

“Oh god, what the hell happened here?”, was what I first thought to myself when I saw this “Asian” esque screenshot of a character in ‘The Sims 3′. The character has been hit with the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect, which is the theory that the more photorealistic computer-generated characters become, the creepier they begin to look. I’m sorry, but I don’t want my sim making out with this chick in the game. She looks so ‘android-like’. Hell, she looks like she game out of the 2nd Sims game. If it weren’t for ‘The Sims 3‘ logo in the bottom, right hand corner, I would think that somebody made a damn good mod and improved the graphics slightly.

I see that EA is really trying to make as much money as possible with the third iteration of ‘The Sims’. Despite changing game engines, the graphics look only slightly better than the previous game. I know, they have a lot of time to fix the graphics, but common if you are working at EA, you’re going to want to release the best looking screenshots that you can, and I’m afraid this might be them.

The screenshots give me a vibe that this game is going to be more of the same old Sims that we know, and have maybe even become sick of. They say that the characters will be more realistic when it comes to their personalities, but they’ve said that before. Supposedly, the character creation is more in-depth, and maybe it will be, but will I really be able to create a sim that looks exactly like Jennifer Anistion Jessica Alba for the in-game version of me to make out with? I doubt it.

I hope that my senses are wrong when it comes to this game, but EA has failed to deliver recently, and the effort they put into The Sims series is abysmal. I guess we’ll all find out whether I’m right or wrong in 2009 when the game is set to be released.

Labels: the sims EA PC simulation